The Grand Disconnect

I get to travel a lot, love it, but more and more I'm getting tired of the cities. The New York's, the Barcelona's, the Tokyo's, these massive temples to consumerism. I love the people, love the craziness, the art, but I hate the disconnect with anything natural. I just shake my head and wonder what everyone's doing, and if anyone really sees how broken a system of greed rewarded, consumption triggered, and dog eat dog worship is. I remember when we had the earthquake here in 2011, the cities started to run out of everything extremely quickly. Picture a city of millions running out of basic necessities like food due to an infrastructure breakdown.

I see this disconnect everywhere, and tonight I was reminded of it again as one of my friend's posted a link to this blog post with its ever so tantalizing click-baiting title.


https://medium.com/@drewfrench/grass-fed-beef-the-most-vegan-item-in-the-supermarket-8c46b45a0d47

But read it. I read it. While I'm sure there are things we can nitpick in the reasoning, I've been saying a lot of these things for a long time. The vast deserts we create when we cut everything down to plant a single type of plant, destroying the ecosystem, and then violently guarding it so no other animal can get in or feed... Let's just think about that. So while my answer is to eat wild game meat and not grass fed beef, I'm giving a big ol' thumbs up to this blog post. And here I am, finally blogging again.

Comments

  1. Good to see you writing again Shigeru. I agree with what you're saying, it's a tough balance.

    In the west there's a real disconnect between people and their food. I've had people look at me crazy here in Italy when I've told them I prefer to hunt or grow all of my own food. They think it's barbaric to hunt, and morally superior to swipe a credit card to pay for some chicken that lived in a cage it's whole life and was eventually slaughtered and prepared by a factory farm. It's a strange dissonance, I don't know if you experience the same thing in Japan or not though.

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  2. Amen. Adog, for lack of a better word! Been thinking a lot about such things recently myself.

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  3. Completely agree with you here Shigeru, I work in a school with city kids and anytime we've been anywhere natural with the kids a lot of them are mind-blown by it... even scared of it. The level of disconnect was really startling when I was out in the New Forest and one kid started whistling to a Red Deer and thinking it would come to him like an obedient dog!

    Since having a daughter I do my upmost to get her out into the wild... although we have very little truly wild places here in the UK.

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